Growing Up at Fuller

Jaday’s story about growing up at Fuller Seminary inspired a Fuller student to complete her Children at Risk degree with a practicum at Mercy Center—Jaday’s non-profit for at-risk children living in Nogales, Sonora. The following video gives insight into how that ministry was inspired in Jaday:

Walking with Jaday LaMadrid [MAGL student] through the Pasadena campus mall provides the rarest of tours—Fuller Seminary through the eyes of a child who grew up here.

“See there?” The woman who has returned to her childhood haunt as a student motions to the prayer garden at the far end of the mall. She pulls up a photo on her phone: the image is a little blurry, but the prayer garden is still recognizable. Three curly-haired kids stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the building as it was 12 years ago. “That’s me,” she says, pointing to the far one on the left. The one in denim overalls.

The timestamp reads “2003”—three years after her parents started dropping her and her siblings off on campus as a safe place to entertain themselves whenever work schedules conflicted. She was 14 when it started, a bored teenager without a smartphone, struggling to entertain a 6-year-old brother and 8-year-old sister for hours at a time. “We were immigrant kids,” she explains. “It’s not like there was really any family here to watch us.”

Both parents served at the same church, yet studied at different programs—her dad getting his Master of Divinity at Fuller’s Hispanic Center (Centro Latino) and her mom studying marriage and family therapy at a local university. They migrated from Mexico to the United States when Jaday was six. “Education was always the reason for being here,” says Jaday, and the reason “we always had to be at Fuller just hanging out.” On Thursdays and Saturdays, when ministry commitments of one parent overlapped with the class lectures of another, her mom left them, with a goodbye kiss, outside the David Allan Hubbard Library—at that time, the McAlister Library—not too far from their dad’s classroom. Though she wasn’t gone long, she gave them three commandments:

“Don’t climb the trees.”

“Stay in this area.”

And, mostly for Jaday, “Don’t talk to strangers.”

So the LaMadrids treated the rules as any kids would: they broke them.

Jaday acted as lookout while her sister and brother swung from the lowest tree branches outside Payton Hall. They hid among the library’s special collections and chased each other through the prayer garden, startling reflective students with eruptive giggles and the slaps of sneakers hitting concrete. And they sat on the benches waving at passersby—mostly international students—students who took an interest in the children and started to look after them.

Some days Jaday’s mom would return to find them wrestling over a fork and a plate of bulgogi and kimchi. “There were always random people bringing us Korean food,” laughs Jaday. “I don’t know what Fuller students thought of us, but maybe they felt compassion because they always saw us there.”

These rich moments of a youth spent at Fuller spurred in Jaday a curiosity for other cultures. She grew to be amazed by the different countries, languages, and accents of friends she met on the mall. She developed a hunger to learn more—inspired by the fierce commitment of her mother, who she would find morning after morning asleep at the kitchen table, a pile of translation books for a pillow. “She always had a better GPA than I did—and she didn’t even speak English,” says Jaday. “She’s been our example of what it means to study hard. She’s my hero.”

Such gleaming images, and an intimate knowledge of Fuller’s campus, planted in Jaday the idea of pursuing intercultural studies in college. “I’d go into Fuller’s library and study while waiting for my parents once I got older,” said Jaday, who was working on her own college assignments alongside doctoral candidates wrapping up their dissertations. “There were other people in the library who had their kids there—mostly Latinos. Often they would watch out for my siblings while I studied.”

“Being at Fuller all that time, and listening to my parents have theological conversations with their friends about the world’s needs—all of that led me to where I am now,” says Jaday. “Fuller has shaped me and, because of the great community I have as a Fuller student, it’s still shaping me.”

Now halfway through her Master of Arts in Global Leadership program, for which she can study online from her home in Mexico, Jaday runs a nonprofit for at-risk children living in Nogales, Sonora—the heartbeat of Mexico’s violent drug war. Her organization, Centro Khes’ed (Mercy Center), provides a safe space for children who have no place to go while their mothers work in factories. Most don’t have fathers. Some have witnessed their deaths caused by involvement in drug dealing or drug abuse. The children cling to Jaday and her volunteers for hope, connection, and a kind of attention that Jaday understands intimately.

“When I got here, kids would say they wanted to be drug dealers when they grew up or someone who shoots people,” says Jaday, who is transforming that narrow mindset through tutoring and education models she’s developed thanks to her professors—many of whom were those Fuller students in the library when Jaday was younger. “Now the students say they want to be engineers or teachers.”

Rosita is one such teenager who’s grown up through the program. She wanted to go to college—just as Jaday did—to introduce classes at Centro Khes’ed for preschool-aged children. She’s already started working with toddlers, and Jaday proudly claims that Rosita’s program is “way better than the one I founded.”

The nonprofit only continues to improve through the addition of Jaday’s newest staff member, Genoveva LaMadrid—her own mother, who felt called to study at Fuller to pastor the church that’s now forming alongside Jaday’s outreach. She graduated from Centro Latino with her MA in Theology and Ministry in June of 2015. Jaday’s dad, David LaMadrid [MDiv ’05], will also join his wife and daughter in ministry while pastoring a church in Tucson, Arizona.

Her parents’ involvement means everything, a gift she sees awakening in her own ministry. “I never realized how important a parent is for the life of a kid,” says Jaday. “The kids now have that at Centro Khes’ed. They call each other brother and sister; they look out for each other. And whenever we pray, we hold hands and pray like family.”